It’s an objective fact that there are films that are so bad they’re great. What this film is…I just can’t answer that. The first thing to notice with Killers (or Real Killers in the US) is that they clearly spent the majority of the budget on using the actual In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida song by Iron Butterfly, the only actual song on the otherwise cheap sounding soundtrack. They even dumped the fact they had the song into the trailer. But the more startling thing to note about the opening 2 minute sequence is that, unlike some other terrible B-movies (in particular the Roger Corman produced films such as the wonderful Sharktopus) this film seems to actually try to do something creative and unique; it is in the spirit of Plan 9 From Outer Space in that sense – the ideas are there, but they’re blocked by the small issue of utter incompetence at making films (also money).
Killers sort of starts weird, goes haywire in the middle and ends bizzarely, all with terrible acting and writing along the way. Hell, even the trailer goes wrong in the middle, nothing seems to happen for a while between the two songs.
So this fim starts off with a violent sequence that cuts to the typical, sterile, badly acted, and vomit inducing suburban home. We see the two killers from the opening sequence on the tv news, having escaped – I think that was them at the beginning, maybe they’re the killers of Killers! Also, the DVD box says it takes “its cues from such classics of the genre as Pulp Fiction” and it also apparently “asks the questions: Do we really want these murderers put away? Or do we just want their autographs?”The first part of that, apart from being a misplaced sense of worth, goes a long way to explaining the horrible script – clearly it’s an attempt to be edgy and “Tarantino-esque”. When the killers turn up at the house, there is a pointless discussion over the married couple’s choice of videos, in particular Free Willy. I could actually feel myself age during those lines of dialogue, about ten years in the space of a minute. Also during every line where the killers try to be poetic, mixing in the odd profanity.
And from the blurb, you’d think they’d try to weave the theme of the modern obsession with serial killers into the dialogue subtly. Well you’d be dead wrong, they say it right out loud! I can see we’re on to a fine film here.
When will this conversation in the sitting room end? It’s been going on for about 15 minutes – oh, I guess they’re fucking the mother and daughter now and the dad is tied up with clown make up on…wait, what??
And then the film goes bezerk. I can’t even explain. The attempt to be deep and asking meaningful questions lasted only the first 30 minutes.
One killer goes to the pantry, confused by the christmas stockings of the family, with an extra one for “Bob”. He ends up in a basement with a melting face orc chick – Bob – who tries to suck him off. The other ends up facing suddenly heavily armed family members and is then led to a dungeon prison with weird looking freaks attacking him. At this point, it all seems to be a metaphor for their mindset of being serial killers and having murdered their parents in the past, they need to deal with their personal demons and that is what drives them to kill. Y’know, something like that, please give me something! Nope, it turns out that this house has a dungeon, as one of the killers complains about their luck in picking a house to hit. Sigh.
All the while during this film there are the compulsorily shit cops picking up the trail in terribly dull scenes, even one where they have a silent conversation. At first it looks like they just forgot to put any sound into it, but then you realise you can hear the woman breathing out the smoke from her cigarette; so it was intentionally a pointless and silent conversation? Why keep that in the film? This makes my brain hurt.
Never does an hour and a half feel like such a long time as in this film. The final act finally rears its head and the family, the members of which seem to keep changing their loyalties to each other and to the killers the entire time, opens a closet full of hundreds of guns. Now it’s the entire family – the dad of which is now meant to be a badass for some reason – versus the two killers, with police/SWAT/army/I don’t care also running around so that the kill count goes up. The family and killers all seem far too resilient to bullets in my opinion. Shouldn’t they react or something? Wait, did she just get shot in the vag? That gives it a few plus points.
And then the film finally ends, with a laboured shootout between the dad and fat killer, who is able to soak up five bullets before shooting the dad once; then heading outside where there are loads of police and he has no bullets. One final word from him, and it’s one I can agree with at this point of the film, “Fuck”.
This film confused me beyond belief, made me angry, but also sympathetic to the genuine attempt to be creative and create something unique. And they succeeded there – there really is no other film like this. H. P. Lovecraft could never have come up with something as weird as this, this is the Abyss.
